Providence

Home is a place called Aroor. Which, like many places in this part of the country is essentially an amalgamation of several back-alleys and mundu clad Chaettas.
It has a butcher and a baker and a man that can source literally anything and is self-appointed ombudsman for all disputes. (On account of wisdom gained during his several months in the ”gelf”)
The internet hasn’t been invented here yet and the local “Hypermarket” swears there is no such thing as a triple A battery.

But, small towns have a strange civility to them. I think this is true of most of them. Reduced anonymity means you have to take time to be courteous to survive. The rules of “personal space” and “personal information” are a little different mostly because the value of community interference in ones life is (at least in the scale of small town living) generally beneficial and the obtrusion is something of a lesser (and hence tolerable) evil.

Aroor is a tiny piece of land that occupies the several hundred square feet between south Kochi and north Alapuzzha. Which has rather interesting corollaries such as my cell phone’s insistence that my walk from the bedroom to the kitchen spanned two cities
Which incidentally is not the first time
a bathroom slipper clad me,
has arrived at a whole new city.
for an Assam tea with honey.

Apart from its cellular coverage ambivalence, Aroor has little else to distinguish it. Apart from the fact that it is dead bang in the middle of Kerala, which in it self is so full of corollaries that attempting to delineate them is like looking for the end in an idiappam. Before you even get half way there the Kadle curry arrives and then you’re just too hungry to bother.

Cat on a hot tin roof.

On the 21st of December 8 nos. cardboard box and 1 nos. Dhananjay, loaded on the veritable corrugated mid steel piece de resistance of the Tempo Trax Toofan Classic, bumped, ground and fought hard to keep our internal contents as internal as possible. Though I think I was more successful at it than 3 nos. cardboard box.

I must admit by the end of the 14 hour ride to Aroor that Balram (seen below doing a Sasquatch imitation, assuming of course that Sasquatchs are generally known to be found grating coconuts) has a spinal cord of Titanium crossbraced Carbon Fiber and buttocks of soft spongy muscular tissue.

Always will be home.

So many great memories crammed into a 72 sq-Ft. office.


Sure it's walls were paper thin and it's roof was mechanically designed to catastrophically collapse at 4 grams more than self weight.... but it was my fortress.
The fantastically welcoming disorder, the funky smell from behind the aluminum roofing sheets and the view!
Coming back to your chair; perfectly tucked away in your cranny and getting a reassuring creak of affection when you lean back in
it ..............just the most awesome feeling.

Security lapse.

..

Apparently, at 5 AM this morning, a morning walker ran up to the security office and burst in panting, severely shocked and hence highly agitated. "The boat!" He had noticed, was gone!!





"What did he think, we had let it get stolen!" said the security guard, after relating the morning's events to me as I entered the campus.
While this was cause for much guffawing amongst our men in chrome and khaki, I am quite sure the vacuum, hit a lot of people the morning after.

I walked into the boat hangar myself this morning and realised that without the boat in it, the hangar is just an out of place bit of blue cavernous pointlessness.

On the rainy night of the 7th of December, a vessel designed for the sea,
that spent all it's life on solid ground.

For just a little while, was airbourne.









In a haze of adrenalin, light drizzle and Raju's spot light, 2 dis-membered hulls and assorted thingamajiks were un-ceremoniously loaded on to two flat bed trucks.

I also realised that nothing can faze a crane operator. Sure he is lifting a two tonne hull, from a hangar in Sadashivanagar on to a truck, but not for moment did his face display anything more than the bored sweatiness of... well a crane operator. I guess nothing is really impressive when you've got it at the end of your hook. Dangling, in total helplessness... sort of pathetic really.

Thank you for chipping in

Chips make fun snacks, firstly because they taste really good and secondly because they crumble with such tectonic fanfare when chomped upon it makes you feel like your mouth is a pulverizing ball mill.

It has been finally decided by the powers that be, that it is about time that the boat moved to Kochi.(Which is incidentally where the sea decided to move to as well; a long time ago.)
A mock assembly of the “trimmings” was installed; to indicate that we could afford to get cocky with the level of completion we have actually reached.
Pillows and mattresses are really good at concealing what are under pillows and mattresses.

Anyway in true RRI tradition, chips and tea, were the comestibles of choice, while well wishers, people who have been associated with the project and well wishers of free food joined in to bid the boat goodbye from it’s now legendary blue tarp hangar.

The hangar has over the last two years has become something of a cleche to RRI’s diverse research flavour. It has un-officially become part of the institute tour mostly because of the gravitational pull of it’s occupant. But this day was inevitable and marks the start of a very exciting time for the project at least for those of us that continue to be involved with it.

Anyhow, the send off had a bit of a fete like feel to it, with photo opportunities in the captain’s chair, in the head and at the galley. With thrilled kids tugging at their mothers pallu, pointing at elements of familiarity in an otherwise very alien carnival ride. “Look, amma …… fridge!!!”And a late evening impromptu wingsail colloquium delivered by a satiated Rad, from the bridge, perched at “his” rightful place at the control cubicle.

.......And you can hold me to that

For casual readers who randomly landed on this page with no clue about what we are doing and why.
And for those of us who have been deeply involved with the project from it's very inception and know every facet like the back of our collective hands.
Here is the "official" project synopsis. A mythical entity until today.

So now atleast, we know as much as that random guy about what exactly we are doing.

A WINGSAIL PROPELLED OCEAN-GOING CATAMARAN

Introduction and Motivation

The only sustainable types of ocean transport - not dependent on depletable fossil fuel – are those powered by solar energy in one or more of its many forms.

The oldest and most widespread such transport are sailing craft, which use the power in the wind to propel them to any intended destination, irrespective of the direction of the actual wind.

An understanding of the physics involved in this ability acquired over centuries of experimenting, trial and error became possible only a hundred years ago, at exactly the time when human heavier-than-air flight was achieved. And the apparent coincidence was simply because of the recognition of a new and counterintuitive force called lift, generated perpendicular to a fluid flow, and precisely what was required to hold an airplane up in the air by virtue of the forward motion of its wing. It then did not take long to appreciate that it was the same force that made sailing to windward possible, and the English aeronautical genius, Lanchester, propounded a theorem in 1907 which quantified the performance of all sailing vessels in aeronautical terms, and that is still valid today.

An immediate consequence of the above was that the best sail one can have is a proper, rigid, 3-dimensional airfoil instead of the usual 2-dimensional fabric sail.

One may ask, why then do expensive yachts continue to be built in the old way? There are several reasons, the main ones being ignorance, conservatism, unfamiliarity with airfoil theory and practice, and a big vested interest in the yacht industry, which profits in millions by selling expensive equipment to do things in the old difficult way.

THE PROJECT.

Control principles and practice:

The yacht described hereunder, and illustrated in the accompanying drawings, is an attempt using all the knowledge and technology available in this space age, to produce a clean, green, safe, efficient and effortlessly controllable ocean going machine. Solar panels and wind generators provide electricity to the batteries that power electric motors for easy maneuvering in harbour, with joysticks that permit independent ahead/astern drive in each hull, and similarly independent electric control of the two rudders. Radio control from anywhere on deck, or even from the quay is an option.

The real drive at sea is provided by a vertical, symmetric airfoil, which also can be effortlessly controlled, manually, electro-mechanically, or remotely by radio, as convenient. The operational equivalent of the strenuous and often dangerous exercise of quickly shortening sail ahead of an approaching squall, is now a few seconds of button pressing for controlled reduction of drive. In more severe conditions, the drive can be instantly neutralised by the push of a PANIC button. This reduces the windage of the wingsail to less than that of a bare mast and rigging in a conventional sailing yacht, providing the desired safety in strorm conditions. Drive can, of course, be restored at any instant as desired.

All composite construction.

The lightness of an ocean-going craft makes for both safety and speed, and so keeping the weight to a minimum has been a guiding principle in our choice of materials and construction practices.

The 15 metre long fibreglass hulls designed by Tate (UK), and built by Praga Marine have been used before in many backwater applications to carry a large number of passengers, and displacing up to 22 tons when fully loaded. As the goal in the present exercise was a displacement of one third of that value (~7tons), one had to resort to high tech materials. They were;

Aluminium honeycomb sandwich two inches thick. All the decks are made of this material which weighs only about 8 kilograms/square meter.

Beams of length 8.2meterrs of carbon fibre. The 15 metre long central support for the wing section is also of carbon fibre.

Metal-foam sandwich.

After considerable experimentation we found that a sandwich made of half inch foam between half millimeter aluminium sheets could be shaped into curves in a wooden mould, and came out to be very strong at only 6.8kgms/square metre. This then provided just what was needed both for the canopy as well as the wing sections.

Other unusual materials used below decks for bunks, seats etc., were

Sintex plastic board sold for bathroom doors, and

Aluminium mesh of heavy gauge for the bunks to support the mattresses.

OTHER FEATURES

Of the four bulkheads in each hull, the first and last were made watertight so each hull has three watertight compartments. In terms of a collision at sea, the end compartments are the most vulnerable, but the loss of one or two of these will not affect the overall buoyancy and safety of the craft. Each one of these six volumes has an electric bilge pump installed, as also a float switch which will instantly alert the bridge by beeper as well as a light if any water gets in.

SAFETY EQUIPMENT

A lifebuoy with a light, lifelines, life jackets, flares, a safety harness to move around the deck in severe conditions, fog horn, fire extinguishers, a watermaker, and a generator working on LPG. The entire deck area is surrounded by stainless steer railings.

NAVIGATION EQUIPMENT

A chart plotter with GPS, two other GPS receivers for redundancy, two depth finders one with an external and one with an in-hull transducer, VHF radio, Radar, Sextant, TV cameras looking both ahead and astern and one on the mast head looking down, and a lightning arrester. Also an INMARSAT communication system.

SUPPORT FOR THE PROJECT

Generous support and assistance was provided, by DRDO, VSSC, ISRO, NAL, BEL, RRI, RAJ HAMSA,

AKZO-NOBEL and The Indian Navy, among others.